Dad - Why Do You Read the Newspaper?

Sep 15, 2016

My youngest son has taken to asking me questions. And, since he’s my son, I find them infinitely interesting and they make me think. He isn’t really cognizant of my blogging at present nor do I find it necessary for him to know. After all, what I write about, isn’t of general interest; I’m nerd folk Still I like to think that on some far off distant day he finds this on the Internet and knows that Dad actually listened.

I’ve been a reader of print newspapers all my life but I only got serious about it when I changed my major in college from mechanical engineering to management. One of my first professors, intro to accounting, said to all of us in class “If you’re a serious student of business then you read the Wall Street Journal” and, to this very day, I read the Wall Street Journal. I don’t always read every page but I try to at least skim it. Sometimes it might take me a week or more to get to a back log of papers but I do actually get there.

Now my son looks at me, reading a physical paper, and I suspect he thinks something like this”

Why?

They just get thrown out

You have an iPad

Behind the times Dad, behind the times

They’re expensive

It’s not customized to what you care about

And in some ways he is definitely right. The Wall Street Journal is expensive. And it isn’t searchable and, as a physical artifact, it has tons of problems. But the broadsheet newspaper format has evolved over literally hundreds of years to its present form. And I would argue that the broadsheet

Is the fastest way to come up to speed on an knowledge domain that changes constantly (i.e. Daily news)

Doesn’t limit me to only information that agrees with me; that’s vitally important in this world of micro-focused content. No one should only read about things that agree with them. Example - I may or may not like either Hillary or Donald but as an informed citizen I should know the issues for each so that any decision I make come November is actually an informed one. Ever since I’ve followed Twitter aggressively I can see both the pros and cons of a world where you only follow things that agree with you and what a damn echo chamber it can be.

It keeps me informed in a knowledge domain that I can talk to literally anyone about. Much of what I actually care about in this world is so bloody obscure(1) that who in the real (i.e. physical) world am I ever going to discuss it with?

The more responsible you are, and I’m a husband and father who internalized catholic(2) levels responsibility back when I was in single digits, I find it all the more important to keep up to date on things.

A good newspaper, say the New York Times or Wall Street Journal, even today is still tremendously well written and like anyone who writes, I can appreciate a well written bit of content whether or not I’m explicitly interested in the topic.

Footnotes:

Example - Ruby / Rails / Elixir / Open Source / AWS. I live in Indiana. Most folks here don’t know what any of that is and the chance of discussing pros and cons of functional programming with anyone I know in the real world except for Steve Grossi ranges from slim to none. And he and I don’t run in the same social circles.

I was raised episcopalian or the closet thing to Catholic since episcopal means “American version of Church of England”. Anyway as a husband and father, I view it as my role to understand what’s going on in the world and be able to explain things like “Dad - what is ISIS?”.